I'm new to the forum and to Linux. I've fiddled with computers for a long time [since the days of DOS] and never been particularly happy with any version of Windows or the insanely huge programs foisted on the public. Anyway, my first experiment with Puppy is on an ancient Toshiba Tecra 8000 vintage 1998. It had been upgraded to Windows 2000, was in the habit of crashing and was incapable of internet browsing with a current firewall and anti-virus program. It has 256 megabytes of ram. I put the current MacPup on it, switched to the JWM interface and it runs beautifully. It will surf the net, boots quickly, runs wireless and is an unqualified success. Pretty good for a 14 year old computer that was close to inoperative.

I then installed the current Wary puppy on my wife's Toshiba U-300 NS1. I gave it to her in about 2008. It came with Vista, which she hated, so a friend put XP on it. The laptop never ran that well after that, and she gave it back to me. The windows installation is hopeless corrupted, boot times impossible etc. I partitioned the drive and installed Wary Puppy. It is now lightning fast and the machine is totally transformed. It has 1 gig of ram.

Both laptops have full installations to the hard drive. I am writing this on the ancient Tecra 8000.

Frugal install in an ext2 partition. Used BSDEdit in Win 7 to set up dual boot.

Puppy OS's tested:

Lupu 528 v5 -- Took an upgrade to the ath9k wireless driver module to get it to recognize the wireless chips. But sound also doesn't work due to older ALSA driver. And a decision not to provide an upgrade for this problem according to developer. Shutdown problems, too.

Sulu -- (Super Lupu) Wireless works and sound works, but developer reports he won't provide active support or further development. Special function keys don't work

Upup Precise -- Sound and Wireless work and some special function keys. Others can be configured with the included xbindkeys-config. But developer reports he has limited time to support this project in future.

3-headed dog -- Wireless doesn't work out of the box but would probably respond to the fix mentioned for Lupu 528 above. Sound does work.

Racy53 -- Best graphic performance of all tested puppies on this machine. by far. Sound and wireless work out of the box. Some function keys work, others can be configured by installing xbindkeys and xbindkeys-config. All around best puppy for this machine-- particularly for intensive graphics, like Google Sketchup 3D CAD under Wine. (Update: I've now added scripts to Racy that monitor battery level and provide warnings at intervals before initiating a proper automatic power down, plus suspend on lid close, and suspend or powerdown after a set interval of mouse or keyboard inactivity. Scripts and description of customizations located here:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=76894)

Saluki -- Wireless and sound worked out of the box, but great stylistic differences in operation, file naming, and programs meant it would be difficult for me to transition to this very nice OS. Probably best for someone new who hasn't been working in Puppy for years. In fact probably easier to transition to this from Windows than from other more standard Puppies.

I seem to have Slacko 5.3.1 running on a HP Mini 2140. The Broadcom 4322 wireless did not work until I got the wl driver and did more or less what it says in the 1st post here:
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?p=344002

HP Mini 2140
2Gb RAM
160Gb HDD

Edit to add - the wireless only worked once. .....

Pleased to report that Slacko 5.3.3 seems to work well on the Mini - picked up the wireless first time. But I've only tried once - so we'll see if it still works when I try again.

Edit to add - tried later and it still works (after a hickup when it looked like all the settings etc were lost) on the HP Mini.

Tested on Lucid Puppy 5.28.
Had to boot with puppy pfix=nox, if xorg was auto loaded screen would be black. Run xorg-setup, select vesa and resolution. Then install intel driver and all ok with xorg.
Optical drive works.
Sound card works.
Ethernet works.
Wireless, had to install iwlagn-firmware-update-k2.6.33.2.pet. Then it works.
Pointstick works
Touchpad works(scroll, tap, all ok)
Card reader works
Something that surprised me was the support for multimedia keys. It has a touch sensitive multimedia keys and all except one worked out of the box. Volume control, mute, wireless, and quickweb worked out of the work.
I have to test bluetooth, firewire, displayport

edit: Bluetooth works. WEBCAM works
edit2: Thanks to Karl Godt now i can set the brightness of the screen! With this http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=78718
So now i could say it works 99%? Only light sensor is missing, maybe with this script i could make it work...Last edited by capicoso on Thu 04 Oct 2012, 02:26; edited 1 time in total

After trying a lot of puppy's distros, finally I found one that works great with my netbook. Puppeee is the perfect choice for my netbook. It runs very fast and everything works fine, because it has all the drivers included.
This is my system:

I've Windows Vista on it. I've tweaked a lot to run faster, I use it for games. I want to run a frugal install of Puppy Linux when I just want to surf on internet, chat. I don't know yet which Puppy version choose, I'm downloading Racy 5.3. I hope it will works fine I will let you know.
Please give me any suggestion if you know a Puppy version compatible with drives of Hp 550 notebook.

Tested on Lucid Puppy 5.28.
Had to boot with puppy pfix=nox, if xorg was auto loaded screen would be black. Run xorg-setup, select vesa and resolution. Then install intel driver and all ok with xorg.
Optical drive works.
Sound card works.
Ethernet works.
Wireless, had to install iwlagn-firmware-update-k2.6.33.2.pet. Then it works.
Pointstick works
Touchpad works(scroll, tap, all ok)
Card reader works
Something that surprised me was the support for multimedia keys. It has a touch sensitive multimedia keys and all except one worked out of the box. Volume control, mute, wireless, and quickweb worked out of the work.
I have to test bluetooth, firewire, displayport, vga out.

edit: Bluetooth works.

Congrats. Sounds like you have a winner. What wireless card/chipset is on this laptop?

You can try them on a pendrive with Unetbootin first to see if you have everything working to your satisfaction first.

Thanks, I read your thread. I've another notebook similar to yours, mine is acer aspire 5310. I remember in past I tried with puppy 4.0 and 4.1 and it was fully compatible with it.
I've tried macup too. It has cool graphic and is a light system.

Now I tried Racy Puppy 5.3 on my laptop Hp 550 and I'm very satisfied with it! Everything works even the wifi that is hardest thing to work with puppy. I've read that Racy is good with newest cpu and it supports computers with more than 3Gb Ram.

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